


Git Gud

by kheelwithit



Category: Magi: The Labyrinth of Magic
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Broke Alibaba, Gen, struggles
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-16
Updated: 2017-07-04
Packaged: 2018-11-01 08:58:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,876
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10918569
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kheelwithit/pseuds/kheelwithit
Summary: Life is a game and money is how we keep score.Alibaba's just trying to Git Gud.





	1. Monetarily Relatable

**Author's Note:**

> I think I prayed for something like this to happen to me. It never really did, and the reality is much more depressing.  
> That's why we write fiction, though.

There are levels of broke. 

There’s a level where you say you’re broke, and you feel the pressure of bills behind your eyelids every time you sleep, but you always have a twenty in your wallet just in case of emergency.

There’s a level where the space of worries goes from worry to panic and the distance between the panic shortens from sleep to blinking.

Then there’s a level where you are, twenty four hours of every day, uncomfortably aware of that you’re just barely treading water and the thoughts that you should get food stamps soon if you want to eat well next month send you into a panic attack for close to thirty minutes outside of the college campus bathroom where you’re taking your work-study program. 

You’re at that point, aren’t you? 

The cold sweat you’ve worked up dries frigid on you under the ugly fluorescent lights and your breath is visible puffing out of your chapped lips as you sit on the ice cold concrete and lean against the tile walls. There are free newspapers next to the vending machines and you pick one up before you head to the parking lot. You grab one.

You smell like manure, your body aches from grounds keeping work, your head is fuzzy and you think you’ll vomit.  
You’re not in any state to drive. You look sadly at your beat up Kia and try to think of the gas you’ll save to compensate if you take the bus and get back to her tomorrow. Your heart has the guts to raise a few centimeters and your sniffle in the cold and your sweat damp, thin hoodie as you shove your hand in your jeans back pockets for your wallet. 

There’s not enough for bus fare inside. 

Your heart, you hope, has learned its lesson about wishing. The universe can sense when you expect things of it and does its best to disappoint you. Ah well, you guess. This is the expense of eating. You don’t really have anywhere to go, only a dingy apartment, your college and your job and a few friends you’re too prideful to ask help of. And your car, tonight, you guess. You fumble with the keys for a second, warily looking around the parking lot to make sure nobody’s gonna mug you before hopping in the passenger’s seat and locking all the doors. You breathe into your hands, huffing in hopes of returning feeling to your poor, grayish fingertips. You can’t burn gas on heating if you wanna drive tomorrow, so you let down the passenger's seat all the way and climb over into your backseat, shoving miscellaneous papers, bill envelopes, pb&j cracker wrappers aside to grab a pair of blankets in the trunk from the last time you had a picnic. Grass falls into your lap. And a stray ant.

You close your eyes and sigh.  
Then you open your car door and very calmly, very tiredly, shake the grass out into the parking lot and blow the ant out too. You wrap the blankets around you and climb back inside before you lose any more sleep. It’s around one, so you’ve got about four hours before you need to do your paper route before school. You swap out your phone battery with an emergency one and set your alarm and pass out so hard that the ugly, distracting fluorescent lights above the parking lot don’t even bother you. 

You wake up to your phone buzzing on your cheek and fogged up windows and you lethargically wiggle your way up into the front seat and start up the car. Your paper route is in the next neighborhood, so you can make it with plenty of time. No breakfast today until you can get back to the apartment, but there are showers on campus in the gyms and you can use those after you get done with your route and change into a shirt from the ones you were supposed to drop off at the goodwill and keep the jeans. 

That’s good enough, you think as you drag your hands down your face.  
Right. Get to work. You clear your throat and wiggle your mouth around and pull out of the parking lot. 

Somewhere along the ride, you kinda remember how to relax. You hook your phone into the cigarette lighter charger on one end and the auxiliary jack on the other end and sorta bend your phone on top of it so that Pandora will play Bicycle race evenly out of all of your speakers. You toss plastic wrapped papers into the yards of rich houses and bob your head around the music and playfully swerve on the road when there’s nobody there on the way back. 

When you pull back into the parking lot, someone’s taken your space and you have to park near the gym, which is good karma anyways. You bend over the trunk to grab a pair of shirts and ignore the humiliation of having to use these showers because you’re sure that other people have to do this too, really, what with college being a savings sucking institution desperate to land you all in an early grave and with debt to any benefactors of yours. You angrily resolve to stop thinking these negative thoughts! They certainly won’t get you anywhere but in a whole bunch of pain so you should just stand straight and---

The pain at the crown of your head is so intense that it makes you nauseous for a second and your world is briefly reduced to circles and you figure that going anywhere will only end up in a bunch of pain as you slam your trunk closed over the tweeting birds spinning round your head. The universe, you painfully rediscover for the umpteenth time, will give you a bunch of pain regardless of your attitude.

You ball the clothes up and shove them in your backpack and hurry into the showers before all the sweaty guys get there.  
There are already sweaty guys in here. The steam and man funk in the air whisk around unpleasantly in your head and it’s back to high school locker rooms all over again in one corner that you steadfastly avoid and the grunting that’s trademark of masturbation in the other. There are doors on the shower stalls at least. You shuffle in without stripping because the immature guys whipping towels at each others asses look like they might make fun of you.  
Inside the shower stall, there is a laminated sign that strongly discourages, nay, forbids masturbating in the shower because seminal fluid blocks the pipes. You look downwards to the puddle you’re standing in and choose another stall, unblocked by some guy’s morning load and you hook your backpack on the inside hook cautiously and tilt the shower head so that it won’t get wet before you pull your sweatshirt off. You unbuckle your pants and hook your thumbs into your boxers and shuck it all in one go and hum the first few notes before you cut yourself off because humming love songs in a public shower could draw a little more attention than you could stand right now. You start up the shower after you put the clothes back in your bag. 

When you get out, fully dressed, the whooping from the corner is gone and the more sensible folk are cleaning up and it’s warm enough outside that you don’t regret leaving your sweatshirt in your bag.  
You get to class and bring yesterday’s paper to distract you from the burning in your stomach.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> not wanting anyone to pity you because you're broke, but pitying yourself the hardest.

You have a habit of looking through job ads during class, but your professor doesn’t mind because he’s not paying for your education. Besides, this is just the last of your math courses and you spent senior year of high school in honors trig, so you know it all. The job ads today are damnably far from your skill set. Truckers, truckers, truckers, pilots, elderly assisting, RAs, truckers, lunch ladies. What little there is for you pays minimum wage and no matter how broke you are, losing another three hours of sleep just for twenty two fifty per shift isn’t worth it. Twenty two fifty wouldn’t even fill your tank halfway up. 

You find yourself going anyways just before lunch because twenty two fifty is twenty two dollars and fifty cents away from eviction. None of the jobs are even close to worth it and one of them is so far in the rich part of town that the drive would soak up the paycheck. You’re trying to figure if you should apply just to make up for the waste today, shuffling through a well dressed lunch crowd back to your car. You’ve got three applications in your hand and you don’t think you’ll take any of them, which is why when there’s another help wanted sandwich sign next to a large, hulking and fairly polished looking office building door, you figure that you might as fucking well.  
You open the double doors. 

You’re only barely twenty and you don’t know if it’s really okay for you to be here.  
You’ve made a place for yourself on a loveseat quietly in the lobby, which looks trumped up and Trump owned; high clean ceilings with crystal chandeliers and marble floors buffed to mirror shine. The loveseat is infinitely better than your carseat and you watch everyone who comes through while the lunch rush comes out through a set of elevators, dressed in Saks and 5th, Burberry, Ralph Lauren, Coach.

 

You wear hand me downs and old navy clearance and are momentarily repulsed by these people, even though, no, because you would give up your kidney to have their lives. Gilded, pretentious, selfish, lucky nepotists. 

The receptionist is essentially a replica of Lucille Ball, looking over Ray Bans and like, eighty feet of space because you, with no designer clothing, are clearly the option that does not belong, and possibly, to her, a vagrant which is not too far from the truth and may signify an ability for future telling. You squeeze your backpack between your shins, where it rests and you fist your clammy palms in your jeans. She calls to you like Jet Lee calls to his enemies seconds before they experience the one inch punch. You grimace and you have to use your hands on your knees to pull yourself up, which is no surprise running on four hours of sleep, but the hiring sign beckons and your checkbook begs and your rent is foreboding.

Your steps are heavy and her ray bans are sliding down her nose by the time you cross the lobby which is irrationally large, much quieter now the last of the lunch crowd is trickling out of elevators to have mimosas with lunch at high end places downtown with pals they’ll probably talk shit about later.  
She doesn’t greet you, types way too loud and snorts out of her nose when you take too long to introduce yourself, like it’s your job to be an agent of hospitality. But you let it go. Tough days happen to all of us, right?

“Alibaba Saluja. I’m here for the now hiring sign outside, so if you could point me to--?”

And normally, this is the part where Lucy here takes pity on your equally exhausted voice, appreciates your polite question, does the job she’s probably getting paid over twenty bucks an hour to do with at least nonchalance and tells you where the heck you’ve got to go to either be done with this or be hired. However, Lucy doesn’t live up to her appearance of a beloved sitcom wife with harmlessly barbed and sardonic wit. No, Lucy is a veritable replica of the Ghostbusters secretary with no apparent reason to be. She takes another two minutes to ignore your existence while you stare bewilderingly at her from in front this impeccably organized desk, and she opts instead to abuse her poor mac keyboard by mashing the buttons like it’ll make words come out faster before rolling her head up towards you, her eyes to god and her wrist to the elevator.

“Penthouse office secretary for the PA position. Go.”  
This is easily the most attitude you’ve ever received in your life outside of retail work and with only four hours of sleep, you close your eyes and yank your cheeks up even though your hands are balled up because your mother taught you to be unfailingly polite and because you really want a job.

You don’t take out your cranky attitude on the elevator button upwards on purpose, at least. Your thumb leaves a fingerprint on the glass and you look blankly at it, something rises in you, quietly stunted, made into a stump that rests at the back of your throat with no hope of rising up further to be voiced and you’re a little startled to discover it’s disgust in yourself. 

You don’t pay any attention to it and pretend you don’t know what’s clogging your throat.  
Instead, you shove your fist into the side pocket of your backpack and have another fifth of a bottle of five hour energy to get you through this alert. There’s no way to make yourself look like you’re not on your last legs, because you really are and you’re too tired, too desperate to be a liar too. 

It has to be enough that you’re up, sober and lucid. When it slides across your tongue, you don’t mind the taste because after a case or so, you just accept that it tastes like shit. When it slides down your throat, nothing impedes it. 

The elevator doors open and you get the pleasure of being jammed next to dozens of folks who decided that lunch at a desk was good enough for them. It smells like designer perfume and starch and cologne and cinnamon gum. You stand awkwardly in front of all these successful weirdos only centimeters from being plastered to the doors themselves. You swallow silently, just like Jerry when he spies Tom the cat on the prowl. You and Jerry are not too dissimilar in the moment.

Tom and the woman beside you are not at all so.  
She’s nudging your shoulder, immensely and unbelievably tall looking forward just like everyone else as the elevator hauls a dozen or so bodies up one by one. She doesn’t look like she could ever work here, and even when you’re looking at her out of the corner of your eye, you can see vibrantly blue hair and flower plugs in her ears. 

“What floor?” You’re almost startled by the courtesy and you have to stumble around the words.

“The uh, the penthouse.” She raises her arm and clicks the button that’s inches from the ceiling like it’s nothing. You’re quietly convinced she’s a WNBA player. 

“Testing my reach are you?” She says it slyly, quietly.

“It’s nothing to scoff at, certainly.” you smile at her, look at her from beneath your hair and she smiles back at you and she’s glowing, a flush on her cheekbones that she’s not really embarrassed of.

And then the both of you seem to remember that you’re in an elevator and while you’re flirting, there are a bunch of thirty something year old ladies and gentleman judging you, because that’s what the human race does. You’re still smiling though and sometimes you catch her looking at you and sometimes she catches you looking at her too. 

Little by little, the crowd trickles out. Floors tick upwards and buttons go off. She doesn’t go, and by the time there are only three little lights on that aren’t the penthouse, she smiles at you again. Large and much less abashed. 

“I’m also, y’know. Going to the penthouse. I’m the uh, secretary for the CEO; Pipirika.”

She looks at you and you can see very easily that she’s your age, maybe a little older and her eyes are like yours. There are freckles splashed liberally over the shoulders exposed by her white pencil dress and over the bridge of her nose. 

She wants to know who you are, now. She’s pretty. She’s pretty and you’re exhausted and unsuccessful and in no place for dating and honestly way beneath her league in every league there could be. 

“I’m uh, I’m Alibaba.”  
And you look down, shove your hands in your pocket to thumb at the five hour energy bottle that you used just to keep afloat and the flotsam and jetsam that accrues in your jeans after living in a car for a night or two. Your fingers flick past that gas receipt you got last week that you couldn’t afford.  
You don’t say anything else, because it’s better not to give yourself ideas because it’s dawning on this point in your life where you’d suck someone down into your shit and you’ve been trying so, so hard to avoid that. Nobody deserves that.

She looks a little crestfallen, when you spend the rest of the ride saying nothing and the practical part of you wipes its hands clean while the crushed, cramped with adult responsibility child in you shrinks away from yet another connection you’ve cut right the fuck off. 

The elevator stops, and, being unable to go up any further, you walk past her, right out the elevator and hear her heels snap away from you, to a desk that’s suited to her size, polished white and covered in cute beanie babies. You like beanie babies, too. Her desk is right next to the door, a hinged section of an entirely foreboding slab of black marble that’s never seen a fingerprint in it’s life. It stands between you and your interviewer, who stands between you and a better job. 

Pipirika silently buzzes a notification to the CEO (which, you should probably be more nervous to meet), and you seat yourself in an armchair that’s a hilariously tasteful leaf green against the white floor. She silently buzzes you in, and it’s really awkward, definitely because there’s nobody actually in there, you think after a good fifteen minutes of sitting outside of the glassy marble doors that separate you from whoever is conducting your interview. You’ve busied yourself in taking out your little plastic wrapped resume, double checked that your pen has ink, and that you don’t have eye crusties or any other obvious nos in the suspiciously reflective surface of the doors. The only actual impossible error that keeps you from looking like an overly-casual business casual college start up kid are the wrinkles in your clothes.

You think about the can of homemade wrinkle away that you packed in a handy spray bottle that you always keep in your backpack, constantly exposed to the elements by that little hole in the corner. 

Well. You could do a little better. 

“Do you uuuh, do you know where the bathroom is?”  
If she looks at you in any way, you don’t know because you’re avoiding it. You’re not sure if that’s more or less awkward

“The left, black marble door.” You pick up your bag and try not to look like you’re speed walking past her desk, the beanie babies and a new pusheen calendar that you’ve noticed. 

Your heart hurts again for lost possibility. Pusheen is fucking great.  
The door is a beast to heft open, and you grunt a little, your duct taped converse slip on the buffed tile and you scramble through the crack you can manage to make. 

Nobody needs actual marble doors, you ascertain and wonder why the hell any architect made that happen. The bathroom is equally senselessly decadent. There’s a chandelier on the ceiling and the sconces are shaped like iron fleur de lis. You prop your bag against the wall right under one, and unzip that sucker to locate the only saving grace of your job hunting career. It’s shit you mixed up like your mom used to, because ironing is hours on hours of work and you wrinkle your clothes later anyways if you’re any kind of decently hardworking man. 

The blue sweater comes off over your shoulders, neatly folded on top of your backpack as you face yourself in the mirror. Your five hour energy addled mind whispers sweet nothings in your ear like ‘we can make this quick’ and ‘there’s something worth it waiting outside.’ Like ‘we can make it’ point blank, honestly. Still, though, you press on. Your stomach growls painfully and you promise it that you’ll have some more pb&j crackers once you finish. Maybe you’ll finally get to go to your apartment and indulge in some ramen. 

Your reflection squints at you with the little hello kitty spray bottle and begins his work, spritzing and spraying until you smell like a giant Snuggle advertisement and every part of your shirt is mildly damp. 

Phase two begins and your hands yank at your shirt, front and back, away from your body. You hold it there and wait. And wait. And then wait some more and then it begins to be concerning and you roll your head so far back that it might fall the hell off. The multiverse giggles and the universe puffs its chest up in pride in front of it’s peers, proud of fucking you over again. You are privy to their sniggers in your head as electro swing plays over the bathroom’s speaker system. You drop your sore arms and snatch up the hello kitty bottle and you already know what you’re going to find, and you don’t know why you hurt yourself but. 

Your nose doesn’t burn when you smell it. Not enough alcohol.  
Your eyes do burn though, and your nose begins to run for a quick moment, you hang onto the edge of the counters and breathe. You whisper to your face and those stupid fucking tears that they shall not pass. 

You blow your nose, you slap your cheeks but you keep it together and you do not cry. All there’s left to do is take hold of your shirt again and flap like a madman and stare down the copy of The Kiss on the back wall, over the urinals. 

Your mind suspects that your interviewer is long, long bored of waiting for you. Because that’s how things just, turn out for you. You prepare yourself to go back to your beat up car and get back to class and those news papers tucked in the second pocket of your bag. 

Someone comes in. Doesn’t pay you mind, which is a kindness, but you stop flapping awkwardly anyways and pray that he won’t call security like that one time in Denny’s because you can find your way out perfectly fine thank you, and he’s probably no different than any other fifth avenue shopper in the building, unzipping his golden zipper to piss on a urinal cake made of eighteenth century vintage potpourri. You can hear him peeing and that’s way, way too weird for you. You stare really hard at the glossy white floor and the fainting couch laid up against the wall. 

“I used to use that stuff.” There’s only one other person to have spoken over the rushing of the urinal flushing, but you’re startled anyways, that this display of wall-street chic hasn’t insta-deemed you a gutter rat. He’s still facing the toilet, doin’ the shake and tuck and you say nothing, because it’s weird to talk to a guy while his dick is out. 

“What is it, again? It’s been awhile since I was an undergrad.” He turns around, towards the sink in his polished up oxfords and you brace yourself for the oncoming assault of expensive cologne when he walks past you to the other sink but it doesn’t come. He just stands there in his black slacks and his blazer, a peculiar white turtleneck that’s a dandy’s take on semiformal, using the little golden soap dispenser to his leisure. 

He turns on the sink with the back of his wrist, washing his hands with a, frankly, excessive amount of soap.  
“Water and fabric softener, right?” 

“And alcohol, if you want it to dry up faster.” You don’t know why you answer, besides that it’s just polite conversation and your brain is too tired not to let your honest thoughts and opinions flop out of your skull like canned meat on an empty Thanksgiving table. Your forgetfulness sits on the back of your tongue like lemon rinds and bile and your face pinches from the flavor.

“Doesn’t seem like you remembered that.” 

“Not enough of it, apparently.” You remain, flapping your shirt wildly like a bird attempting to achieve flight with it’s gut instead of it’s wings while the gentleman flicks his hands away from the sink and pats each and every single patch of skin with the hand towel hanging on the wall. His gaze rounds itself on you, then, suddenly and like he has an awful lot to say to you, which only bodes badly. Your flapping winds down and your suspicion winds up. 

His eyes crinkle up at the corner, like his mouth that’s twisted up in a smile that makes his young face look more critical and jaded than his age should allow. He looks at you and your bag with the patches and the duct tape on your shoes and how, you suppose, do not belong here.  
The affront would be insulting if you weren’t experiencing, curiously, what it’s like for someone to look through you, to your past and their own all at once. It’s violating, paralyzing and exposes you to a person with the audacity to think that you’re both the same. 

You stare back because whatever, you don’t know.  
Maybe you need that. Or. Maybe you’re so needy that it’s getting to that point again where you’re just projecting yourself into a deeper hole. 

‘Are you here for the PA position?” His voice is blends quietly like a vocal effect on the electro swing in the quiet bathroom, smooth, hypnotic, even. He never stops staring at you staring at him, body comfortably slouched against the counter, sublimely okay with a fucked up example of a nineteen year old staring at him like he holds answers or something. Because you’re sure it shows on your face. 

“I’m sorry, what?” 

“The interview.” You look down, because you don’t need to be such an easy target for the universe. Your hands are still awkwardly fingering your shirt, which is still damp enough that your nipples are hard under your shirt. They take it upon themselves to flap again, and your eyes are firmly focused on the white cotton that’s trying it’s very best to lower its evaporation point. 

“Yeah.” 

“Can I see your resume?” You vaguely worry to yourself that this man is absolutely outside of his mind, he’s reaching into your shit, grabbing the little clear folder that is way too easy for him to find, what with being labeled

“I can tell it won’t work out.” 

“Yeah, I-- I guessed that.”

“You don’t have the attitude,” he casually throws out, “to deal with a person like Sinbad. Or his clients, actually.” He flips through your reference letters and previous experience and every jack of trades certification you’ve received. 

“If you’re anything like me, anyways. You never can quite tell. You’re more suited to something with less-- well , it wouldn’t be polite to say. But, I can assure you, less.” 

Humiliation burns through your cheeks and your stomach broils. You’re rewrinkling your shirt and you let it go, throw on your sweater with a sneer on your mouth and you fucking snatch your not pathetic resume back from this stranger who isn’t any damn different from the Greenwich Village fucks down in the lobby; except he seems to think that at some point of his loan free, debt-less college years, he ‘struggled’ instead of slumming around with the broke kids on purpose. 

He has the audacity to look shocked that you snatched your shit back, hands curled faintly defensively around himself to stop what? The unpredictable, poor brown savage from hitting him? 

“Why don’t you work for me instead?” Before maybe, you might have been disgusted in yourself for your poverty, but between the two of you right now, you see who the low down fuck is. 

“I don’t need a hand out, but thank you.” And you will not stoop to his level, or give him any satisfaction.

You don’t pay him anymore mind, and you use your entire body weight to haul back on the door handle.  
It comes easily, fueled by your pissy attitude and you start on your way back the hell out of there, back to your uncomfortable ass car seat and your empty ass apartment and back to the two jobs and freelance degree that keep you eternally under the poverty line, but barely alive. 

You cry in the elevator, because you just wasted a gallon of gas for an interview you didn’t even go to, and life is hard, and you feel like a shit stain on skid row.


End file.
